Real Weddings, Advice, & Inspiration

Catalyst Wedding Company highlights weddings by and for game-changers. We seek to amplify and empower voices and viewpoints that are usually missing from the Wedding Industrial Complex. We're a community of badass wedding professionals who love all things funky, fresh, diverse, unique, and personality-driven; we convene twice yearly for (un)convention, a collaborative workshop, styled shoot, and dinner party. We're also the publishers of Catalyst Wedding Mag, a resource for couples looking for inspiration and affirmation that doing things differently in wedding-world is not only ok, it's wonderful!

Welcome back to The Bachelor, a show where one man navigates the rocky waters of romance against the backdrop of a crumbling nation state.

Before we begin, I want to bring to your attention to a tragic coincidence of which I have heretofore been ignorant: Waukesha, Wisconsin, Nick Viall’s Middle American hometown, is the very place where two pre-teenage girls were convicted of a gruesome murder attempt in the name of a scary monster called Slenderman.

Now, let me make something perfectly clear: correlation does not equal causation. I am in no way suggesting that Nick Viall is a ”tall, thin man with a featureless face who resides in the forest and preys on children.” That would be a wild, totally unfounded allegation, and I simply will not make it.

Anyway, this episode opens with Taylor and Corinne hashing it out in the middle of the Waukesha woods–braver women than you and I, knowing as we do what exists out there. But they’re not thinking about Slenderman. Taylor and Corinne are trying to work out their friendship problems–or lack thereof.

Photos Courtesy of ABC

There are two distinct consequences of struggling to make friends in middle school. The first group of outsiders says, “Fuck the world! I’m going to break all the rules, and you can all S my D!”, and these are the world’s great artists–they grow up and gentrify poor neighborhoods in cool cities and run DIY spaces and star in John Waters movies and fight for the right to smoke that sweet kush. The second group of outsiders says, “Fuck the world! I’m going to follow the rules so good–so perfectly well–that I will win everything and spend the rest of my life chalking other people’s distaste for me up to jealousy!”, and these are the world’s insufferable squares–the bosses who micromanage you at the day job you hate and then stick around for a drink at happy hour, trying and failing desperately to partake in conversations about art and music with the very underlings who hate them.

Taylor is part of this second group. Burned once, she clings fiercely to the narrative that she is hated because she is inherently superior to those around her. Poor, beautiful, unprivileged Corinne is the kind of woman who most often is at the receiving end of this misled rage. She laughs loud and often, jumps on beds for the camera without wearing a bra, and isn’t 100% sure what “emotional intelligence” is–although she’s almost CERTAIN it doesn’t go hand in hand with maturity.

The conversation ends with a draw, and despite Corinne’s warning, Nick keeps both of them around. He does NOT keep Astrid, the girl with the ineffectual sports bra who unexpectedly won the right to take a bath with Nick on a sports field several episodes ago. She is the first notable woman to depart from his ranks.

Finally done with the pre-teen violence he had scheduled for Waukesha, Nick piles his concubines onto a private plane headed for New Orleans. Once there, Rachel, 31-year-old lawyer and recipient of Nick’s first impression rose, is invited to join him solo for a romp in the New Orleans streets, and perhaps later, the New Orleans sheets.

Nick calls his chemistry with Rachel “explosive,” and curiously enough, I agree. When Nick is with Rachel, he dials the sociopath way down and talks to her almost like she’s his equal. Of course, she’s not his equal–she’s much, much better than him–but her presence on the show serves to remind us that half of these women have only just recently been weaned off of their mother’s titty milk. Meanwhile, perfect Rachel is a bad bitch lawyer who will hopefully make a name for herself by successfully arguing in favor of Ronald Drumpf’s deportation back to hell.

So what do they do? They eat oysters and hot sauce, lead a parade of trombonists through the streets, make out on an esplanade, eat dinner in the New Orleans version of the Rainforest Café, and then make out again–this time on a float! Essentially, the producers have recreated my version of a perfect day and given it to a man I hope to never meet. It’s bittersweet, knowing that dates like this won’t be possible when the Trump administration issues 6pm curfews to all American cities.

Nick, like the rest of America, is SUPER into Rachel. Part of me wants them to run into the sunset together, away from the lights of the camera, and the other part of me wants him to break her heart so we can have a whole Bachelorette season full of her.

The next group date involves all of the women, minus Corinne and Taylor, who will later head to the bayou for a three-on-one voodoo ceremony. Nick takes the women to the Houmas House, one of the most haunted houses in the entire country. This New Orleans mansion once belonged to very rich people who almost certainly owned many slaves, although the producers are solely interested in the parts of history that involve 8-year-old white girls who were so coddled during life that they continue to be an entitled brat in death. GET OVER YOUR DOLL, MAY, IF SHE WANTED TO HANG SHE WOULD CALL.

Corinne’s promise to “make America Corinne again” is literally the closest The Bachelor franchise has ever come to letting one of their characters talk about politics. It’s a baby step in the right direction.

While most of the women are locked in a haunted mansion with Nick Viall, and the pre-teen ghost he’s probably going to make murder them all, Corinne is taking a full bottle of champagne to the face in a bubble bath. Taylor is…just kidding, no one cares what Taylor is doing. Probably memorizing the periodic table “just in case it’s on the test.” The important thing is that Corinne isn’t letting Taylor’s sass keep her from living her best life, and that, my friends, is what a hero does.

Corinne’s promise to “make America Corinne again” is literally the closest The Bachelor franchise has ever come to letting one of their characters talk about politics. It’s a baby step in the right direction.

Back at the haunted former slave plantation, Raven accidentally lets drop to Nick that she’s in love with him. Shittily for her, he still gives the rose to Danielle M. I think? Honestly, I’m pretty sure it was around this time that Sally Yates was fired for refusing to violate the Constitution on behalf of “our” “president,” so I was preoccupied by Twitter.

The next day, Nick takes Corinne and Taylor to the bayou to meet a high priestess who teaches Corinne how to use voodoo magic to sabotage Taylor. Something about the whole ceremony feels…culturally appropriative? but, once again, this is low on the list of the producer’s concerns. You can see Corinne’s business savvy on this date. She wastes no time getting the high priestess to teach her how to ruin Taylor’s life with magic. It’s no surprise that Nick ends up sending Taylor to the left, and like Chad from Jojo’s season, she must find her way out of the bayou back to human civilization.

Unfortunately, we all have our breaking point and it turns out this is Taylor’s. While Nick and Corinne are at a nice dinner, Taylor is back in the bayou, partaking in a montage scene of voodoo magic training with the high priestess who has proven herself to have no loyalties.

Most witches are loyal to only themselves. You would do well to remember this.

Join us next week to find out if making out with Nick Viall in a Nicholas Cage mask cured Alexis of her totally rational fear of Nicholas Cage.

Becky Scott is a writer based in New York who loves The Bachelor and is great at giving humorous advice.

Catalyst Wedding Co.

Catalyst Wedding Company highlights weddings by and for game-changers. We seek to amplify and empower voices and viewpoints that are usually missing from the Wedding Industrial Complex. We're a community of badass wedding professionals who love all things funky, fresh, diverse, unique, and personality-driven; we convene twice yearly for (un)convention, a collaborative workshop, styled shoot, and dinner party. We're also the publishers of Catalyst Wedding Mag, a resource for couples looking for inspiration and affirmation that doing things differently in wedding-world is not only ok, it's wonderful!

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